A Great Escape

October 5, 1986|By Laura Stewart Dishman of the Sentinel Staff

Flame, by Judy Feiffer (Delacorte Press, $16.95): Judy Feiffer's fourth novel is eminently forgettable but still makes for appealing escapist literature. The situations and characters have little to do with reality, and thank goodness!

The lusty and ruthless Buck Herman, who climbed from a life of misery on New York's Lower East Side to power in Hollywood, rules and then ruins the lives of everyone who works for him. He destroys Mischa Kahn, the sensitive violinist whose son, Nick, becomes the book's hero.

Another vampire, Russian ballerina Anna Andreyev, defects in order to raise her daughter as a dancer in the West. But that child, Anna, longs to escape from her cruel mother, and seduces first Nick and later his son-in-law.

Scene after scene in Feiffer's book reveals deliciously naughty, occasionally amazing scenarios. But by the book's end, true love triumphs. Of course.